LuceneTutorial-DarkSleep.docVIP

Lucene Tutorial By Steven J. Owens Jarkarta Lucene (/lucene/) is a high-performance, full-featured, java, open-source, text search engine API written by Doug Cutting. Note that Lucene is specifically an API, not an application. This means that all the hard parts have been done, but the easy programming has been left to you. The payoff for you is that, unlike normal search engine applications, you spend less time wading through tons of options and build a search application that is specifically suited to what youre doing. You can easily develop a custom search application, perfectly suited to your needs. Lucene is startlingly easy to develop with and use. Im going to assume that youre a basically competent programmer and that you are basically competent in java. Use the Source, Luke This tutorial is a brief overview; the Lucene distribution comes with four example classes: FileDocument IndexFiles SearchFiles DeleteFiles These classes are really a good introduction to how to use Lucene. I wrote this tutorial because I find it easier to follow code if I have a general idea of whats going on, but it was tricky to write because it starts to look like the source code. Lucene really does make it that easy. Overview Im going to try to use emphasis tags any time I introduce a Lucene API class name. Heres a simple attempt to diagram how the Lucene classes go together: ?Index? Document 1 Field A (name/value) Field B (name/value) Document 2 Field A (name/value) Field B (name/value) At the heart of Lucene is an Index. This class usually gets its data from a filesystem directory that contains a certain set of files that follow a certain structure, but it doesnt absolutely have to be a directory. You pump data into the Index, then do searches on the Index to get results out. To build the Index, you use an IndexWriter object. To run a search on the Index you use an IndexSearcher object. The search itself is a Query object, which you pass into IndexSearcher.search(). Index